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Introduction

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Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature

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Abstract

On 23 May 1733, the young John Percival, later second Earl of Egmont, attended the levee of the de facto prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Percival was out of favour. He had recently dabbled in political opposition, and was widely known to be the author of a pamphlet attacking the government’s controversial plans for excise reform. Among the numerous aspects of Walpole’s administration that this work had criticised were its corruption, its reliance on placemen, the insidiousness of a political network held together more by promise of reward than by sincere public-spiritedness.1 For all of his high-minded rhetoric, it was this network that Percival sought to re-enter by visiting Walpole that morning.

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Notes

  1. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 174.

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  2. For general discussion of the first and most persistent theme — corruption — see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 19–22.

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  3. J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (London: Cresset Press, 1960), pp. 325–33.

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  4. Edward Pearce, The Great Man: The Life and Times of Sir Robert Walpole (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), pp. 1–2, 206–7. The second theme — virtue versus expediency — is implicit in H. T. Dickinson’s summary of the reasons for a schism in early eighteenth-century Whiggism: disagreement over the relative importance of ‘the need to protect individual liberty and the need to preserve public order’. The same idea is expressed by Reed Browning as the willingness of Court Whigs to dispense with ‘silly or wasteful or even harmful strictures’ in government.

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  49. The preface to the latter, justifying the publication, is particularly notable for its thanks to both the ‘Friends’ and the ‘Enemies’ of the author, gratitude which reflects upon the peculiarly public nature of the correspondence contained therein. For Pope’s own posthumous role in the publication of Bolingbroke’s Idea, and Bolingbroke’s reaction to that publication, see Fannie E. Ratchford, ‘Pope and the Patriot King’, Texas Studies in English 6 (1926), 157–77.

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  63. Tom MacFaul has provided a somewhat artificial, but nonetheless useful, distinction between Ciceronian and Aristotelian views of friendship based upon their relative flexibility: the Ciceronian mode is perceived as more rigorous and idealistic, whereas Aristotle allows for more inferior forms. MacFaul also charts the rediscovery of ‘true’ friendship by Renaissance humanists like Desiderius Erasmus, but notes the persistent philosophical fragility of the idea and its resistance to exact definition. See Tom MacFaul, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 1–9. Key texts for friendship’s classical and Renaissance formulation include but are by no means restricted to: Plato’s Lysis; Books VIII and IX of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; Cicero’s De Amicitia and Book I of his De Officiis; Seneca’s De Beneficiis; Erasmus’s Amicitia; Montaigne’s ‘On Friendship’; and Francis Bacon’s ‘Of Friendship’.

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    Emrys D. Jones (Lecturer in English)

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© 2013 Emrys D. Jones

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Jones, E.D. (2013). Introduction. In: Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300508_1

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